In many commercial or industrial construction projects, a single project can have thousands of different requirements. Current project management tracking systems generally maintain a record of current project requirements. These known systems manage a database of project requirements that is accessible to authorized users associated with a project. These systems usually enable authorized users to make changes to requirements. The systems may then display an indication to other authorized users identifying which requirements have been modified or added. Generally, once a requirement has been changed and approved, past versions of the requirement are not available to be viewed.
In some instances, a history of requirements needs to be viewed. For example, project auditors need to review how project requirements have changed over time to determine why a project has become over budget. In other examples, project requirements may be improperly or incorrectly changed, thereby overwriting the correct requirements. In other instances, a final compliance check (final punch) has to be completed before a customer can approve the completion of a project. Oftentimes, the final compliance check includes approving changes to original requirements or determining why some requirements do not match the final result. In these instances, the customer or project manager has to review and verify hundreds or thousands or requirements.
In any of these instances, database architects generally have to recreate the requirements for previous time periods. Data analysts then have to painstakingly reconcile possibly thousands of requirements for the different time periods of a project to identify which requirements changed and exactly when each of the requirements changed. While there are some tools to help identify the differences between databases as a way to identify when requirements changed, these tools still require analysts to view each change. As a result, an audit or a recovery of previous requirements can take days or weeks to perform. A need exists to improve these inefficient and expensive project management tasks.